alt Hacker News> I believe what is happening is that those images are being drawn by some script-kiddies. If I understand correctly, the website limited everyone to 1 pixel per 30 seconds, so I guess everyone was just scripting Puppeteer/Chromium to start a new browser, click a pixel, and close the browser, possibly with IP address rotation, but maybe that wasn't even needed.
I think you perhaps underestimate just how big of a thing this became basically overnight. I mentioned a drawing over my house to a few people and literally everyone instantly knew what I meant without even saying the website. People love /r/place style things every few years, and this having such a big canvas and being on a world map means that there is a lot of space for everyone to draw literally where they live.
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> I think you perhaps underestimate just how big of a thing this became basically overnight.
They don’t need to estimate because in the article they talked to the site and got their traffic numbers: An estimated 2 million users.
That’s 1500 requests per user, which implies a lot of scripting is going on.
> I think you perhaps underestimate just how big of a thing this became basically overnight. I mentioned a drawing over my house to a few people and literally everyone instantly knew what I meant without even saying the website.
On the other hand, this is the first I've heard of this thing.
They have the user count from the dev, 2 million daily users shouldn't be generating billions of requests unless a good portion of them are botting.
It's also way more than 1px/30s -- Its like 20px/30s and you have a "tank" of them, which you can expand to however big you want.
Placing pixels gives you points, which you can turn into more pixels or a bigger bag of pixels over time. I've seen people who have done enough pixel pushing that they get 3-4K pixels at a time.